US teen Ledecky improves her own world record in 1500 free

“I was barely even focusing on this morning’s swim”, she said.

Ledecky added, “I hope we can both get into the final”.

“My strength is my back end so I’ve worked a lot on my front end so I can take it out easy and come back strong”.

U.S. swimming sensation Katie Ledecky is so good she just casually broke a world record during a race in which her coach told her to take it easy.

The 18-year-old recorded four minutes, 01.73 seconds to qualify fastest for the final later on Sunday, 2.74 seconds ahead of Australia’s Jessica Ashwood.

While the Kazan Arena was only half full, Ledecky’s American teammates and family members in the stands were going wild, and she acknowledged them after climbing out of the temporary pool.

In the women’s 100m butterfly, Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrum, the defending champion, qualified fasted for the semi-finals.

There was disappointment for Australian teenager Mack Horton as the 2015 world leader in the event finished 11th in the 400m heats to miss the final by 18 hundredths of a second. That gave Ledecky plenty of time to savor the moment, while resting on the lane ropes.

The heats of the 1500m freestyle for women is a workaday affair under normal circumstances but then there is nothing standard about Katie Ledecky: world record, 15:27.71, inside her own 15:28.36, set at the Pan Pacific Championships previous year. She is the polar opposite of Missy Franklin, the 20-year-old champion who won four gold medals in London and is all-exuberance, all the time.

“I tried to race that from the start and back-end it. Sun Yang is a distance swimmer so he has more endurance than I do so my best chance was to go out hard and try and hold on”.

Monday night’s 100m breaststroke final pits Britain’s world-record holder Adam Peaty against South Africa’s Olympic champion Cameron van der Burgh and the pair have broken the championship record three times in Kazan.

Hosszu may swim up to seven individual events in the eight-day meet. She nonetheless does bodily remedy two or 3 times every week to strengthen her again. “It was the first big road bump of my career”, she said. The Maryland teen said she has enrolled in some classes at Georgetown University and plans to continue community work through her high school. “After last summer I have this new appreciation of getting up there and not worrying about injury”. That was the seventh fastest time in the prelims, topped by the 1:46 of China’s Sun Yang, who won the 400 Sunday.

“I’m glad that’s over”.

“Im really happy with my speed in that, ” she said after Sundays race.

He courted controversy in 2014 after it emerged he had served a three-month doping ban from the Chinese swimming authorities for taking a banned stimulant.